The increasing popularity of handheld mobile devices, such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA), and the like, coupled with advances in wireless networking technologies, is enabling new classes of mobile applications. For example, field force industries that heretofore captured information on paper-based forms may now record the information (manually and/or automatically) in electronic forms using applications on their mobile devices. It is also possible for organizations to define and deploy their own mobile device applications and forms as well as any business processes associated therewith. An example of a method and system for defining and deploying mobile device forms, applications, business processes, and the like, is described in U.S. Published Patent Application No. US2006161646, entitled “POLICY-DRIVEN MOBILE FORMS APPLICATIONS,” filed Jan. 18, 2006, assigned to TrueContext Corp. of Ottawa, Canada and incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. The forms, applications, business processes, and so forth, may then be provided to the mobile device users through a managed service provider (“MSP”) hosted environment.
In existing mobile devices, however, management of the various mobile applications, electronic forms and data therein, and corresponding business processes, is largely a manual process. Typically, mobile users must personally monitor the status of any instance of electronic forms data (e.g., completed?, ready to be sent?, etc.), track the different applications being used, perform any maintenance on such applications, and the like. Uploading the instances of electronic forms data and the information therein, for example, to a centralized database, or sharing the electronic form data with other mobile devices via the World Wide Web (“the web”), also must be done manually. Similarly, there is currently no way to automatically track updates to mobile applications, electronic forms and business processes, and to synchronize them with a back-end server. To the extent any of the above tasks may be automated, each software developer or software provider presently provides its own automation component that is applicable only to that software provider's applications, electronic forms and business processes. The result is an uncoordinated set of applications, electronic forms, and business processes on the mobile device that is inconvenient and burdensome to manage and contributes to inefficient use of time and mobile device computing resources.
Thus, despite recent advances, there is a need in mobile devices for a unified way to automatically manage multiple applications, multiple types of electronic forms, electronic forms data instances, business processes, and/or network services from different software providers. More particularly, there is a need in mobile devices to be able to allow mobile applications to automatically detect, monitor, and process electronic forms, electronic forms data instances, business processes, and/or network services from different software providers according to each provider's business processes, and the like.